Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 144.djvu/90

84 colour, brilliant as the hues of humming-birds. Velvet butterflies, with their bars and targets of purple and yellow and blue; beetles and ladybirds of burnished steel or gold; flies of emerald or topaz; graceful indescribable things with branching horns, or with wings fashioned like medieval shields; gorgeous dragon-flies and big bees drowning the voices of their fellows with their deep trumpet-buzz. This was a periodical sight of which I never tired; a sight not to be equalled in the fairest gardens of Europe.

It is in the garden, too, that one learns something of the wonderful ways in which nature arms and protects her tender children against the natural enemies who surround them, – frogs and birds, lizards and men. The slim green grasshopper that loves your rarest palms, how closely he lies under the leaf, the same colour as his body, where he would be undiscovered but for the tell-tale traces of his destructive work where the leaves are cut and hacked as if by a child with scissors. The stick-insect, hardly distinguishable from the dry lichen-covered twig along which he is stretched; the leaf-insect, shaped and veined and coloured like the leaves through which he wanders; huge, soft, defenceless caterpillars, with mimic horns and painted eyes to terrify their enemies with a show of force – how marvellously are all these protected by Nature! careful, it would seem, not only of the type, but even of the single life.

But of these endless tribes some must have more than a passing notice, for they are our familiar comrades, whether we will or no, throughout our Indian sojourn.

The first to welcome the European, the last to bid him farewell, is the mosquito, that miniature gnat, with the innocent air and delicately pencilled feelers, who is for ever literally thirsting for his blood. Few and far between are the places altogether free from the great trier of temper and endurance, whose airy grace contrasts ironically with his low cunning and his sleepless persecution.

There are rare instances of people who, from some unknown cause, arc proof against the mosquito. I have known a fresh young girl arrive from England, doomed by all precedent to be cruelly tormented by mosquitoes, yet whom no mosquito has ever bitten. Armed by some secret charm – and she has many – she has enjoyed through years of Indian life a perfect freedom from one of the greatest of its minor trials. But there is not one in a thousand who is thus secure, or who is not a constant prey to the tormentor.

It seems strange that creatures of which the vast majority live in grassy jungles, where animal life is rare, and where their only food would seem to be vegetable matter, should so eagerly feed upon the blood of animals; but certain it is that this is a luxury they pursue with unresting vigour, and for which they knowingly and even gallantly risk their lives.

If you have patience to watch the mosquito, you will soon see something of his courage and perseverance, of his intelligence and his cunning. He knows well the range of your eye, and in daylight will never settle within that range. Alighting on the arm of your chair, he will run under shelter of your arm and attack the fleshy part of your thumb, where of all places his bite is most irritating; then rising and hovering in the air when your attention seems occupied, he will take care that even